Comments by "Tony Wilson" (@tonywilson4713) on "Is Nuclear Power “Too Expensive”?" video.

AUSTRALAIN ENGINEER HERE: I like your channel but you have a couple of things in this video that are horrendously wrong and anyone who has spent time in any industry would be able to understand it. My degree is in aerospace but I have worked in industrial control systems and automation for 30+ years across a number of industries. I have worked on project ranging from a few $1,000 to multi-billion dollar projects where at times I have been responsible for several hundred million dollars of plant. After a small consulting job in 2016 that alerted me to Australia's energy crisis (and yes its a crisis) and the complete lack of anything resembling a plan I got interested in energy. More to the point I wanted to know why there's NO plan and 8 years later there still isn't. There's policies but policies ARE NOT plans. FIRST - The problem Australia has is common across the entire developed world. That problem is in 2 parts. One simply not recognising that we were always going to have the energy transition because of the simple fact that power stations wear out and have to be replaced. Two the dominance of economists in decision making including in things they have no understanding of like power stations. Mark Blyth the Political Economist at Brown U. says (paraphrasing) "Its hardwired into economists that they see everyone else as a problem that they have to manage." Dr. Jason Hansen is NOT an ENGINEER he's an economist and therefore part of the problem. I don't care if he's employed by Idaho National Labs or not. Here in Australia The CSIRO has made the same mistake. They hired economists to evaluate nuclear power and got the opposite answer to Jason Hansen. our main science organisation CSIRO just released a report on energy and it too is done by economists and they say the complete opposite to Jason Hansen. Economist are MANIPULATORS of data. If I didn't know better I'd say they have a special class in every Economics Syllabus titled "How to manipulate data and statistics to mean whatever you want!" SECOND - A major problem which you do partly address but not well enough is the issue of grid stability. For anyone interested the YouTube channel Real Engineering explained this in a video titled "The Problem with Wind Energy." The real value that nuclear brings is grid stability by virtue of the size of nuclear plants. Plants based on reactors like the AP1000 and EPR 2 (which are the current generation) with passive safety, are what people need to consider because they have been built and are running. THIRD - And sorry but this is where you made a huge mistake. For someone claiming to be a Science educator you let fly with a ridiculous claim on efficiency. EVERY Thermodynamic process has an efficiency. Something could have an efficiency of 0.00000001% and you can still say its efficient. Claims of efficiency are spurious and misleading unless you compare it to something else and for the record. The EPR 2 has a thermal efficiency of 36% (see Hinckley Point C on Wikipedia) The AP1000 has a thermal efficiency of 33% (see Vogtle on Wikipedia) Gas or Coal thermal plants have historically been around 35-36% but can be as high as 42-43% with high pressure boilers. I know Rio Tinto helped a Japanese plant get over 42% in the mid 2000s. But I also know some of the older coal plants (like Hazelwood) fell away to be around 20% towards the end of their lives. Gas turbines can be as high as 45% (GE claim the 9HA.02 at 44%) Combined Cycle Gas turbines can be almost 65% (GE claim the 9HA.02 in CC at >64%) I personally think that there will be an enormous amount of work done on improving efficiency in coming years especially in the area of waste heat. It does NOT matter which process we have been incredibly wasteful with all these technologies. It wont be easy but we have to be better with energy. If you look at something like an EPR 2. The thermal energy is 4,524 MWt and output is 1,630 MWe. which means there's almost 3 GW of energy going to waste. YES the temperature differential is lower but we have to find a way to tap into that. If the nuclear industry wants a future learn to tap that and the LCOE will go down a significant amount. One of the most interesting claims I have heard was from Mark Blyth the Political Economist at Brown U. who's one of the very few people from the economics area with a functioning brain. He pointed out a study that said if America simply triple glazed its windows the energy saving would help America get most of the way to its Paris requirements. All those glass towers in the big cities are staggeringly poor at thermodynamics. They either let in too much energy when its hot and act like greenhouses which requires energy to cool them OR they leak massive amounts of energy when its cold and need huge amounts to keep them warm. IF YOU WANT TO TALK BOUT THIS STUFF LET ME KNOW
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@mysticx0 The please explain what people are going to do for electricity where there is no viable wind and solar? I am all for putting in all the wind and solar that we can, but to think it will do everything for everyone is utterly IGN0RANT of basic reality. So you and all the other clowns like you better explain what you are going to do for those places where its impractical.
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